PHILADELPHIA—In the mid-1970s, banker, real estate maven, philanthropist, and Philadelphia native Jack Wolgin installed Claes Oldenburg’s specially commissioned (and now iconic) giant Clothespin in Center City along with Jean Dubuffet’s Milord la Chamarre, a 24-foot depiction of a man in fancy costume in the artist’s characteristic l’art brut style. The additions to Philadelphia’s cultural landscape raised the city’s profile internationally. But as monumental as those works are, Wolgin, now 92, may make a bigger impression with his latest initiative, the Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts.

When Temple University’s Tyler School of Arts made its move last year from its suburban campus into North Philadelphia, Wolgin saw an opportunity to again bring great art and a good deal of attention to his hometown. Administered through Tyler, the $150,000 award is the largest juried prize in the world to go to an individual visual artist. To be awarded annually, it is intended for an artist who has not yet received widespread recognition outside of the art world and whose work breaks new ground by crossing traditional boundaries.

"There was a great deal of discussion about the term ‘emerging artist,’ ” says Ingrid Schaffner, referring to one of the competition’s criteria. Senior curator at Philadelphia’s Institute for Contemporary Art, Schaffner was one of three jurors who selected the three finalists and determined the prize winner — to be announced Oct. 22 — from a larger pool of nominees, the exact number of which has not been released. “Many artists we admired were not selected because they were so far advanced in their careers,” she says.

After Schaffner and fellow jurists Paolo Colombo, adviser to the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, and Melissa Chiu, director of the Asia Society in New York, had defined their terms, she says, “we surprised everyone by coming to a consensus fairly quickly.” In the end, the three finalists — Ryan Trecartin, Sanford Biggers, and Michael Rakowitz — are perhaps not as emerging as one might have imagined, ranging from their late 20s (Trecartin) to 40ish (Rakowitz), and all having exhibited widely. But based on the work on view at the inaugural competition on view at the Temple Gallery through Oct. 31, it’s not difficult to see how they ended up there.

Each artist is represented by an installation of works incorporating sound and sight in a way that demands interpretation on its own terms. To enter any one of the three mini-shows requires a significant perspective shift, and, complicating matters, each occupies a space not completely sequestered from the others but instead situated in what amounts to a long hall broken by floating walls, so the viewer must walk through the first two installations to reach the third.

Sounds bleed between the spaces, though it’s perhaps not as disruptive here as elsewhere. Moving from section to section, viewers experience a good amount of dissonance — and not just auditory. These are three artists with vastly different agendas. Biggers, whose work is encountered first, spoke to ARTINFO about his contribution at the exhibition’s opening, noting that he doesn’t “over-author it — confusion is part of the experience.” It is, a bit, and that sense of confusion seems to be a thread running through the work of all three artists here — in a good way. There is a palpable sense of each person trying to communicate an experience that’s far too complicated to be explained in a straightforward manner.

The centerpiece of Biggers’s installation is Bittersweet the Fruit, a life-size replica of a willow tree with a small video monitor placed inside the trunk, showing the New York–based artist (who is also a musician) playing a piano in what appears to be a rain forest, riffing off “Strange Fruit,” the song about a lynching made famous by Billie Holiday. Headphones for the viewer to put on hang on two ropes knotted like nooses, one red, one black, and dangle and sway from the limbs of the tree when not in use. The piece was inspired in large part by the racially motivated killing of James Byrd, who was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death in Texas in 1998.